In Memoriam: Ever On and On

“The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say”

- J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

I had made a Ceramic Pot. It was lumpy and lopsided and I had worked on it so carefully. So carefully crooked, it was. I was 13 years old and it was the last month in my last year in Middle School. 8th grade. Though very young, I already felt broken apart and consumed with fear and sadness and a hatred for a strange new body and a bewildering world. She knew it. My art teacher was colorful and brilliant and messy and funny and I loved her so much. It was like she was the only one who could see the invisible children. She took my wonky slanted pot and with the end of paintbrush she carefully and purposely wrote that Tolkien poem in the soft clay. “The road goes ever on and on.....” She set the pot back down in front of me and I read it, smiling. I most certainly did not want to “go forever on and on.” I wanted to stop right there. Stop Everything. We fired the pots and mine, of course, chipped badly.

 

It was a hot and humid Louisiana May. I found a dead bird out side the art room window. I wanted to bury it, so she let me. During class, even. We went outside and I wrapped a frail winged body and dug a shallow grave. Petals, leaves, damp earth, and sticks. The little bird funeral was attended by maybe one other student. She said if burying it was important for me, I could do it. She said it was symbolic. I was a miniature performance artist. 

 

The school year ended and I left her class and guidance forever and went to the Dreadful High School. 25 years later, I still have that wonky slanted pot. I still touch the words, the beads of clay around the impressions. She taught me, at a very vulnerable and tender time, that it was okay to be imperfect, to be crooked in a level world. Not just me, either. All of us. 

 

She died while I was in college. I had a letter ready to mail to her but it was too late. She was gone from me forever this time. When I feel this life bearing down on me in a way I can’t understand, sometimes I reach back and I search the memory banks for those scraps of words and actions and books and poems and music that made sense. Searching for anyone who ever loved me, any version of me. Even 13 year old me. For what we said and what we did. It mattered. Matters. I love you, Fran Heath. Rest in Peace forever. 

 

 

N.O. Love (new orleans)

June has been movement and July is promising to be more of the same. From one end of the state to the other. to Georgia. I saw the Cure play in Atlanta last month and it was as good as ever. Crowded. But music is timeless and if it is good I can make the crowd disappear. Trance out to it.

Solstice. Now time for the heat. Nothing like New Orleans heat I swear to god. All the heat from all the summers before are stored in the concrete, the old wood walls and the brick. radiating outward in the thick damp and stagnant air. I moved to a house in the lower ninth ward that is better than the one I was living in and so the heat inside is more tolerable. I drive to work instead of walk now, though. And I still can't breathe. I am closer to the nearest refineries, but I can't smell them. I can almost see them. If new orleans is a bowl then the refineries line the upper edge of the bowl. Smoke stacks rising like burning stalks, machinery making irregular shapes out of the sky and smoke billowing up til it mixes with clouds and then you dont even know its poison. You may think how pretty. My eyes are swollen and burning every day. I think to myself that I need to move. Should move. The move to this other house was lateral, not upward and the dirt is lead and the sky is going to kill you.

Something is keeping me here though. There are a few more things i need to do. It is a complicated place. and not the violence and not the corruption nor collapsing infrastructure. The actual unspoken invisible social and historical outlines. Bc no one really belongs here but whoever has been here longest thinks that they do. And the new people keep coming and the deafening shouts of gentrification and poverty drown out any sense that could be made.  A couple years ago in this big art spectacle event that lasted months a well known and respected artist made a big light up signage and displayed it on the river that read something like "you belong here." Some weird reassurance or something but its not true.  No that it matters if it was true or not but we don't. Maybe some people belong here more than others. I don't, but its a port city and visitors are historically a big part of the population. the shifting foundation. The plantations didn't belong here and neither do the oil refineries that took their places. the prostitutes, the immigrants, the organ grinder, the dairy that was cited for health code violations and the street car rails that were laid down, pulled up and laid down again. That all came from the census. I used to read the 1880 -1940 censuses for work and stare wide eyed at the names and occupations and places of birth of hundreds of people that didn't belong here. Then came the artists and writers and poets and everyone said 'bohemian.' The housing projects and the police corruption and then the cop that massacred that family in the restaurant. and they just kept draining the swamps and spreading out and then an amusement park bc what could be more American that NONsustainability? They built a fucking tunnel. In a swamp. Still there -  though dilapidated and still cars zoom through it err' day. I feel like my job has given me a level of intimacy with this city that is reserved for lovers that stayed together so long they have turned to couples who have memorized each others vices and hardly recall the starry eyed heart flutters from the beginning. But you still know it must be there. or assume it is and move through the motions of life, confident the spark is there. the commitment may have obliterated it a little, but who cares. That is me and this god damn city.

 

 

shawna atkins acrylic on canvas 2016, crop

The house I live in belonged to lady who left for Katrina and never came back. I am aware of her displacement every day. It can't not define, at least partially, my place in this city.

skulls and layers of happiness

The city is so pretty in the spring. Before the intense oppressive hot wet blanket of summer envelopes us... i love it here. Like I just woke up and the days I hated it were a dream. Ridiculously expensive crowded crooked broken city. I do love you when you are kind. and when you aren't, even.

but i will never love anywhere as much as an isolated spot in a forest where the deer are.

Busy painting. I inherited old frames and a box of brushes from my great aunt... will be interesting to hold her brush..she was 94 when she died I think. a long life. I have the brushes and frames I inherited from Donna and I think... Oh, the things that after death still remain. tangible. in this realm.

The election has gotten into my brain. I care more than I want to. How can one not? vicious. I'm a berner -  as if there was any way I couldn't be.

I paint the world burning bc it already is, not bc I want to see it that way. I feel like the apocalypse has been happening my whole life. When I was a kid - like 15 or so -  This art lady told me that when I grew up, I should marry a rich man so I could make art all day. All the time. She laughed. She said "that is what i did." She did, too. She said she knew I would never! and I was horrified and amused simultaneously. I get it, though. I know what she meant. I live alone and I work alone and I work HARD. I sleep hard and paint hard and when I collapse, I do, but I resume. Bc that is the stuff of survival and the stuff of existence in a corporate controlled capitalist nation. And I got all I ever wanted. Until I decided I wanted something else. Blood in me is pumping toward oblivion.

When I was very young I was supposed to marry this guy. I think i was. Well, I could have. I didn't though bc it just all felt so wrong and smothering. His parents died. Both of them. It was so tumultuous and insane and just wild. I remember we laughed So much. and Cried so much. We broke up one time and then later we met somewhere in Lafayette in a parking lot in the middle of the night. I missed a year of college. I mean I attended and all but I didn't know what happened - like it just didn't count. We were together and then we broke up again and we met up again on the steps of the state capital building. I dont know what happened to him. I hope to god he is somewhere good and that he is very, very happy. I'm so thankful we didn't destroy each other. He showed up in a dream recently. people fade out and then reappear. I didn't know it happened that way as time pressed on.

I think I always wanted to rage against a system of oppression. i hated it since kindergarten. The nudges to conformity and boredom.  Away from truth and dirt. The obvious mistreatment of certain individuals by people in power and then the denial of it. Processing injustice. Life here is learning to process injustice and then deciding what you will do about it.

Dirt is the tangible unconsciousness, until I return my skull to the dirt I suppose I am here shedding skins and morphing and deciding the level of intensity with which to apply the next layer.

                                                                     Artemis Sees.....

Shadow Self

  "Shadow Self," mixed media on 4f tx 4ft canvas, 2015

How much of whats hidden down in the shadows is guiding this flesh ship? Waves from the unconscious sea lap tirelessly at our thoughts and actions. Tossing and slamming and churning below a barrier created by the only self you can truly know.

Written like a true 4 infp am i right?

Breathe deep

When i am old and ragged there will be love in my bones, wrapped and tied there with ribbons of sadness splattered with joy. I haven't lost anything by opening my heart even though all the words tumbled out and were away like wisps I held the blood in and I held all of you in til we were faded digital dreams on broken screens 💚🌙🕸

Speaking in Tongues ( love your life to death)

i speak to myself in my head and i suppose we all do
in this culture, anyway. but to exist entirely inside your
head must make some of them go mad
if you were to watch humans moving and see them
only as balls of energy bumping around in a pinball world of light
trees and buildings
the ones burning red and the ones burning green
or blue or purple
if you could see that ....
i dont know. that is how it all looks to me sometimes
i am elevated and apart -  watching it all move. from afar. witched.

I went to the west coast in the fall and then again in the new year
The first time I visited i was 16 and I think all of me did not come back
When i went back it was as though I may retrieve the part of me I left but
instead i brought back a part of the west coast inside my skull. I cant shake it out.

I visited the east coast in the summer and i loved it but not as much as the west coast
the redwoods can erase all the vile humanity from my mind and make me forget i
have a body or veins or that other people scuttle around admiring themselves incessantly
or beautifully even. touching. breathing. loving. filling the atmosphere with emotions and shit.

i have an amazing life. I did everything i wanted. I arrived and left when i meant to and nothing was ever so tragic.

But still there is. The nihil. a visitation or a vigil. for the unspeakable truth, the ever present death.
My blood sisters bound to me with time and sickness and large shady trees in the backyard. We ebbed. flowed away and returned.  When times goes by you get to see how your memories will age. will they fade? or vibrate or blend ? or become so vivid it is blinding to visit them.

My blonde baby girl Aphrodite was chosen by the devil to carry the darkness in her mind. She nearly died til they electro-shocked him out.  She was cured. It was real. I saw her change and then change back.

I texted my ex for a long time before I fell asleep. He wanted advice. I am a sage in a Misfits t shirt on a stack of pillows drenched in moisturizer and splattered paint from a failed art experiment. Okay, I will tell you who you are again -  but I ve been telling you for years. I know you better than you know yourself. But you can't know me. But you know I can help you. and that is good for now.

i dreamed by cousin called. she died in 1997. in the dream, on the dream phone, she sounded like she always sounded. It was her voice. I thought that I had forgotten what she sounded like. But no. it is still there.

I moved to a new house in the beginning of December.  Happily it is still close to the river.  I have to, have to live near the river.  The house was built around 1890 I think. I hope to god it is haunted.

Love your Life (Lie) to Death. 1.5 inches by 2 inches